Jingo

Not to be confused with Edward Bond's Bingo, or his own play Dingo, Charles Wood's Jingo eminently deserves its first revival since 1975. Described as "a farce of war", it uses the fall of Singapore in 1942 to expose the arrogance, absurdity and pathos of a beleaguered British community softened by imperial self-indulgence.

Wood's main charge is that the British allowed Singapore to fall into Japanese hands through negligence. Instead of reading us a lecture, he makes his point through laughter, showing the Brits pursuing their own hedonistic games even as disaster looms. Setting the action in Raffles hotel, Wood focuses on the gaily promiscuous Gwendoline, who is hotly pursued by all the men in sight. Sexually dissatisfied with her second husband, a dithering major, she dallies with her ex-partner while offering token resistance to a senior officer who craves to be spanked. It is rather as if Private Lives were being played out against a background of public tragedy.

Wood makes scant reference to the Australian troops caught up in the Singapore disaster or to Churchill's larger responsibility. But his dialogue has a vividly staccato comic poetry. While showing the racism of the expats, who treat the Chinese hotel staff as serfs and refer to the Japanese as "the little yellow men", he also suggests the military bunglers are themselves victims of war; in a stunning reversal of sympathy, the masochistic officer suddenly explains how he was "buried alive in that first frightfulness in France".

Tom Littler's production, beautifully designed and lit by Will Reynolds, contains perfectly pitched performances from Susannah Harker as the glamorously myopic heroine, Anthony Howell and Peter Sandys-Clarke as her rival husbands, and Paul Mooney as a pukka punishment-seeker. Time now, perhaps, for a revival of Wood's Dingo, which offers an even more savage assault on the surreal insanity of war.